This session will take participants step by step through the set-up and execution of a large-scale linguistic experiment on Czech data. It will focus on the way the experiment was designed: where the topic came from, how the hypothesis was chosen and operationalized, how the survey parameters were set up; how the survey was road-tested and refined; how the analysis was carried out. It aims to provide participants with a road map for creating their own such linguistic experiments and to explore some of the issues commonly encountered (e.g. choice of measurement scale; length, structure and number of surveys; recruitment of participants, practical measures to improve data quality). The results of the survey will be discussed in the second talk.

This session reports the results of a large-scale linguistic experiment on Czech data. Our survey set out to test common assertions about the Czech National Corpus – i.e., that it reflects the written language found around us and thus should mirror our own preferences about written language use, or that it is an artificial construct, whose data tell us nothing about the structure of Czech. With data from nearly 300 native speakers, we were able to confirm some correlations between user preferences and corpus frequency, but found them to be less strong than is often supposed, and with some ramifications for the emergentist perspective on language structure.

Relativization in Czech is typologically quite diverse, making use of three of the four commonly recognized types that are defined by the way the relativized noun is referred to in the relative clause itself. While this fact is not commonly discussed in the Czech syntactic literature, it raises a number of typologically and theoretically interesting questions about Czech relative clauses, concerning their distribution, their properties and behavior, as well as their mutual relationships. Starting with a brief overview of the three patterns, the talk will focus on the two types that have been largely ignored in the grammatical literature: relative clauses with the non-declinable relativizer co, which may be followed by a resumptive pronoun (pronoun-retention pattern) or left without a pronoun (“gap” pattern), against the background of the stylistically and semantically neutral relative clauses, introduced by the fully declinable relative pronoun který ‘which’. The co-relativization represents a robust family of constructions that show varying degrees of schematicity, each with a set of characteristic properties. The relevant analytic categories, with implications for the typology of relativization strategies beyond the Czech facts, revolve around the referential type of the relativized noun, the interaction between relativization and deixis, and the semantic contribution of the proposition expressed by the relative clause. The analysis takes into account also frequency-based patterns of usage as attested in the Czech National Corpus. Using the analytic and representational tools of Construction Grammar, I will show how grammatical generalizations can be organized in cognitively and communicatively coherent networks of overlapping grammatical patterns. The networks provide a way of (i) identifying points of fluctuations within the usage of a particular form and (ii) tracking incipient shifts within a functional space.

Coarticulation is one type of variation in which the sounds of spoken language communication are shaped by the context in which they occur. Another type of variation is due to a change of speaking style in prosodically weak and semantically predictable contexts that can manifest itself as vowel reduction, consonant reduction, and segment deletion. Some of the mechanisms that have been used to explain how these types of variation can turn into historical sound change include the listener's occasional failure to normalise for the context in which speech is produced, lexical and statistical frequency, and neuromotor repetition. A largely unresolved issue is whether there is a link between coarticulation and hypoarticulation-induced sound change. An attempt will be made to shed some light on this issue through analyses of the production and perception of coarticulation in prosodically strong and weak constituents. The tentative conclusion from these studies is that prosodically weak constituents may be more likely to provide the condition for sound change to take place because the increased variation in such contexts may cause listeners to have greater difficulty in compensating or normalising for the effects of coarticulation.

This talk will be concerned with some of the methods for deducing the likelihood, progess, and direction of historical sound change through empirical analyses of speech data. The first part of the talk considers some of the approaches using the deductive method that are common in relating the conditions that give rise to sound change to the variation that is inherent in both the production and perception of speech. For this purpose, some examples will be given of how physiological studies of vowel tongue movement can be used to shed light on some of the principles of vowel chain shifting. The focus in the second part of the talk will be on the use of so-called apparent-time studies that are more typical in sociophonetics for analysing the spread of sound change. Some examples will be taken from a recent study of a sound change in progress by which pre-aspiration is changing into post-aspiration. The final part of the talk will be concerned with the value of using a longitudinal analysis of data obtained over several decades from the same speaker for disentangling the influence of biological age from phonetic sound change.

Emmerich Kelih: Lexical richness in text: new approaches to stylometrics

The talk is a brief introduction into recent quantitative studies of the lexical structure of texts. The linguistic information of the rank frequency distribution of lexemes and word forms is discussed. It is shown that beyond the problems of statistical modelling (Zipf’s law) rank frequency distribution provide a rather rich linguistic information about the lexical structure of texts. In this context the notion of vocabulary richness is discussed in detail. Furthermore the linguistic relevance of the h-point as a fuzzy border of auto- and synsemantic word forms is shown.

This presentation focuses on quantitative approaches of the analysis of morphosyntactic properties in language typology and crosslinguistic studies. Based on the welll known dichotomy of analytic and synthetic languages it is shown that the Type-Token-Ratio (among other features like Greenberg’s word length, number of monosyllables, number of word forms, frequency of pronouns etc.) is a reliable index of analytism/synthetism of languages. The empirical results are based on the analysis of Russian, Czech, Bulgarian, English and Chinese parallel texts. Methodologically the usefulness of statistical testing in cross-linguistic studies is shown.

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have a primary deficit in language abilities. SLI involves a significant delay in the acquisition of language in the absence of any hearing deficits, neurological disorders, emotional and social problems, environmental deprivation or mental retardation that could account for their language problems. The first part of the course will review domains of language that tend to be impaired in SLI in different languages (e.g. agreement, aspect and tense marking, case marking and relative clauses) with different accounts offered to explain these. Although there are claims that in SLI, language is selectively impaired in an otherwise intact cognitive system, research in the past two decades has shown that the impairment in many (if not in most) cases turns out to be not as specific to language as originally claimed. Most often impairments are reported in the domains of motor organization, working memory, inhibition, and more recently, in implicit sequence learning. The second part of the course will focus on these nonlinguistic domains, and how they relate wo the language deficits.

Norbert Vaněk: Bilingual lexical processing

Much of our current knowledge about how languages are organised in the bilingual mind comes from performance measures including reaction time, eye movements, and brain potentials. A vast array of findings from production and especially comprehension studies with speakers of diverse language combinations suggest that bilinguals seem to have surprisingly limited control over ‘switching off’ the non-target language system. This lecture surveys standardised psycholinguistic methodology alongside some novel techniques used in the field (such as semantic relatedness judgements, form and meaning interference in translation recognition, variations of the cross-language Stroop task); discusses thought-provoking parallel language activation phenomena (e.g. crosslinguistic priming and interference, the paradoxical language switching effect, patterns in accidental selection of lexis from the unwanted system), and looks at how the mapping of L2 forms onto meaning may vary as a function of second language proficiency. The concluding part aims to raise awareness about connections between particular strands of empirical evidence and the most resonant debates about language representation in bilinguals.

Norbert Vaněk: Ultimate attainment in L2 acquisition research

Why does L2 acquisition generally ‘fall short’ in matching the success of L1 acquisition? Can second language learners ever think fully in their L2? The goals of this lecture are threefold: (a) to familiarise the audience with competing explanations for the upper limits of L2 attainment (maturational constraints vs. selective attention to L1-driven form-meaning relationships vs. conceptual convergence), (b) to provide an overview of frequently used methods for testing highly advanced L2 users (including tasks on visual & auditory perception, elicited production, acceptability judgements, ambiguity resolution, verbal & non-verbal categorisation, memory, attention allocation), and (c) to compare sample studies across three conceptual domains (time, space, colour) that test L2 users’ conceptual shift towards target language patterns. Focus will also be placed on questioning the validity of monolingual native speakers used as a comparative baseline, as well as on the need to carefully consider a host of important linguistics and sociocultural variables when setting up L2 acquisition experiments.